10 Famous Movies Whose Genres Everybody Always Seems To Get Wrong
6. The Big Lebowski
Mistaken Genre: Comedy What It Actually Is: Mystery/Satire At first glance, this 1998 film, written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, comes across as a stoner comedy similar to Half Baked or Dazed and Confused. Big Lebowskis main character, Jeff Lebowski, aka The Dude (played by Jeff Bridges), is an unemployed, sandal-wearing slacker who enjoys marijuana, White Russian cocktails and bowling. Like other classic comedies, the films prime catchphrase - the dude abides" - is firmly entrenched in our pop culture lexicon. But while The Big Lebowski is definitely a funny film, can one really call a movie that is based on Raymond Chandler's 1939 crime novel, The Big Sleep, a comedy? As Joel Coen said in a 2011 IndieWire interview: We wanted to do a Chandler kind of story - how it moves episodically, and deals with the characters trying to unravel a mystery. As well as having a hopelessly complex plot that's ultimately unimportant. The main thing that distinguishes The Big Lebowski from the The Big Sleep is the Coen Brothers chose to go with the humorous Dude as their main character rather than using a noir-esque private detective a la Philip Marlowe.
Mark is a professional writer living in Brooklyn and is the founder of the Chasing Amazing Blog, which documents his quest to collect every issue of Amazing Spider-Man, and the Superior Spider-Talk podcast. He also pens the "Gimmick or Good?" column at Comics Should Be Good blog.
